By snoadmin
Senior design students held a fair Monday to encourage students to complain at the event named Shut Up and Vote, put on in light of the 2008 presidential election.
Every year, senior design students work on a Legacy project and this year’s theme is voting.
“Our whole point is the fact that everyone is fine to complain, but they don’t do anything about it and one way of having their complaints heard is voting,” said Melissa Madrid, a senior design major.
At the Shut Up and Vote fair, students were encouraged to write their complaints on a wall or drop them in the “Bitching Box.” At the end of the event, they painted the wall that symbolized complaints are just complaints unless action is taken.
Senior photography major George Miranda, a registrar worker, manned the registration and poll sign-up table. Miranda said more students signed up to work the polls than register. He said when he is out in communities the opposite usually happens.
“If you don’t vote in November it’s just rhetoric,” said Mike Whitlow, advertising design assistant professor who runs the Legacy project. “This is a way to get them out of themselves and doing something for somebody else, and use all this design and advertising talent.”
The students came up with the theme to reach out to new and young voters after, during a brainstorming discussion, a student blurted out, “I wish people would just shut up and vote.” They liked the idea so much they focused the entire project around those last four words.
The Shut Up and Vote team enlisted debate students to help advertise the event and spread the word to vote.
Planted in classrooms, debate students would bring up one side of an issue sparking a conversation with the other undercover debate student who presented the other side of the same issue. The students would end the argument by saying “We should just shut up and vote,” and put a post card on the classroom door.
Whitlow said he felt this approach was effective because students asked their teacher about it, noticed the post card and logged on to the website.
The student-created Shut Up and Vote website, ShutUpAndVote.org, lists major issues like abortion, immigration, health care and the economy. Website users can click on each issue to see the different opinions or complaints. At the end of the lists of complaints, the website answers by stating users’ opinions can make a difference if they “shut up and vote.”
“It is very important. We are just trying to get awareness out,” said Lily Piyathaisere, a senior design student. “[With] the Obama campaign this year you can really see how design can affect voting and voter turnout.”
Piyathaisere said she has enjoyed working on the project and that she was happy to see an impressed response from the students who stopped by.
“[Working on] something so small as a group together, you can make this big idea and spread the word,” Piyathaisere said.
